Monday, August 29, 2011

Brill: Time's Up For "Race" Laggards (Like NY & HI)

Here are various reviews of Class Warfare, starting with Alexander Russo:

The whirlwind process of reviewing and approving $5B worth of Race To The Top applications is for me the most interesting and useful part of Steve Brill's new education book, Class Warfare, as well as being one of the focus points of the interview he did with me for the September issue of Scholastic Administrator. In the book, Brill describes how boxed-in Duncan and his team were when it came to a review process that resulted in some obviously in accurate state application ratings. In our interview, Brill argues that Duncan was right to go along with the outside scoring of the state applications at the time but should stop payment or even try and recover funding from states where there has been and will likely be very little progress implementing the promised reforms. It's one of Brill's better suggestions, given how much time has passed and how little seems to be happening in some of the 12 states that got all that money. A draft version is below. The good stuff comes towards the end.